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Two Notes on the Election

1. I keep hearing about “the real America,” which is presumably different from the fake America of which I am indubitably a part. You know, until this phrase started showing up in right-wing discourse I was inclined to hear Obama’s talk of unity and coming together as campaign rhetoric; but now I see that it marks a real difference. The right is exclusionist, liberals inclusive by instinct, if not always in practice. Here’s just one example, from a bush-league congressman. Update: Only Real Americans® should be allowed to vote.

2. I don’t expect the McCain campaign to make the distinction, but there is a difference between criticizing someone’s approach to stem cell research or one’s health care plan and making darkly portentous statements about someone’s character that suggest the other guy is not a true American (see above). It would be nice if the news media enforced this simple distinction in the name of intellectual honesty.

we — my mom and pop and seven kids — moved to dallas, texas in 1948 from niagara falls, new york
when i was eleven going into the sixth grade at our lady of perpetual help gradeschool nr love field.
those were years that began my experience with right wing nuts and where senator joe mccarthy
had a great influence. anything bad could be subsumed under the labels of commie, pinko, fellow-traveler. that was a so called ‘real’ america for a certain majority and prepared the ground to murder a president in 1963 in november.
here is apple tree in november a poem of mine.

APPLE TREE IN NOVEMBER

1. What was finished, celebrated is almost finished again. My life is your story.

Your story a submarine skin envelope holding my story in worlds, walls dividing

my story, your life. The where’s and when’s keep turning on a spinning plate half-dipping into the Pacific Ocean and we on this tilting/raked stage where great ships

foundered with their great sentences of life and death—unfinished symphonies for the future out there that is our audience and who’ve driven-in to watch thinking that they

today have cast-off the overcoat that stifled thought for us, not realizing that thought

was the marriage of these rocks of experience this broken glass these diamonds in

exciting shapes the rising sun fallen where the rainbows arch over beehives.

2. Ugly is just a sharp paradigm shift. Praise for a red tractor. Dancing for chump change. Death an epistemological rupture.

Between lust and first folly is misspoken weeping. Ice skater on the glass of love.

Apple hooking into taste as it pours from the roofs of mouths.

I’m hitched to a string,

the shape of a heart. If I pull it or yank it, it comes apart. My past fell apart, it fell on the

floor. Do nothing, be smart, you’ll hollow your heart. Go to the end, jump in, take a

swim around your island. You’ll learn that the noose comes from within.

On an island

in the Bay—tears, anger, snot, spit; born, unborn: love, pre-intentionalist, is a soft

sunrise. Twitching. A covenant drifting. The dead are among us. Tactile interface of

memory: the dead are a lifetime buried in every moment. Baghdad heart, brick-red, done

in the antique style of rooted standards, outlaw blues, kiss of troubles. Is it worth it? In

the crosswalk on Oak Street near Gough (rimes with cough) where the red and dusky

San Francisco night before the dark looks upward for birds flying south from Canada the

earth is a body of interconnectedness. Life’s a daily scavenger hunt as the helicopter pushing air down lifts and the shiny lacquer of a left-out lawnmower partners seven little

Mexican mango with champagne flesh light as a feather fluttering like ash once awkward and now terrible. We are fish in a net where roses of soot silt down into a lake of sleep. A woman came up to the edge. Pilgrims knelt to each other. Fiction can’t erase the teeth marks. Salmon pink, a slice of tomato, annihilated rendezvous-silkiness. Picnic. Drip pan. An unknown subtext beckons tumult in lavender flames. Enchantment: a dark speaking through a megaphone to this woman who bites her hair and code-breaking the gates of dreams that quench beauty red as blood, soft as cream. Light is amber, lantern-lit, catenulated halos drifting over riptides toward dawn gloaming. Surf is a pale tan woman, a green silver surging, a blue yellow renunciation. “Wkhah” “Wkhah” says the wind in the mind. This is action’s rose with green streaks of diagonal light igniting the garden in Tumbletown. Stardust a diminishing gusher of milk as it pinkens becomes a slight wicker coracle. The scar of full daylight has you crawl some days and boil each third. The old Queen Grandmother rages. Baby hummingbirds long for the cap and cowl

of a trumpet bloom. Slippery bridge this silver fire and blueberry cream: these are lost lessons and an inner journey where deer in a protected park flood the experiment’s unity.

Memories, notes, glints, glances, baroque voices that carry love, sorrow, dancing images into the evenings of tall reeds that stand in moving waters sinking with the waters into the soil absorbed, evaporated to crust to dust that under later rains give over to damp earth ripening with memories that come from whatever life will press upward for the death ship for new sowing.

3. Telephone call then a summary a sea change, something more masochistic than divine.

Playground happenings, pals, thin, tough, jittering with velocity, high horses: they are scattered and buoyed by discipline, some say a high art whose escutcheon has low pay.

4. The wheel is round and childhood desire turns life’s wheels, these large hoops, propelling them with sticks under the tall park elm trees. Movement of wheels.

Everyone there is here now within you and all of your kin and all of your kith are here now and it will take a lifetime to flower and to fly and to sail this sea of thickening light. Room-tone, mouth-feel, a reordering of parts, rationing of emotions: I hear voices: they live here now without forgetting the way back under the surface of consciousness, the bungled aspirations, of leprosy as a model, and grim ire. Life pushes, photography wins over time, and over the mind a brown shale. This is November.